Mur Lafferty is a genius. Right now, right this SECOND she’s reading this and going ‘Alllll, no I’m not!’
Revel in your geniusness, Lafferty. REVEL. For it is a real thing.
Mur’s work on I Should Be Writing and, with fellow genius and hard travelling word slinger Matt Wallace (Preorder his book here by the way), Ditch Diggers is essential. No other word covers it, the endless support and help those two shows provide writers of every kind and stripe cannot be overstated. Without Mur the industry I work in wouldn’t exist. Or, at least would be a tenth as much fun.
As well as helping writers she’s a phenomenally good one in her own right. The Shambling Guide series is urban fantasy that’s different to almost everything else in the field and is clever, fun and dark as Hell when it needs to be. The Heaven series remains a high watermark for podcast and novella fiction (Hey! Lafferty! Feeling smug you were there years before everyone else? You should be!). Now, she has a new book in the works, from Orbit. Here’s the breakdown:
It was not common to awaken in a cloning vat streaked with drying blood.
At least, Marie Shea iv had never experienced it. She had no memory of how she died. That was also new; before, when she had awakened as a new clone, her first memory was of how she died: from illness once and from injury once…
Maria’s vat was in the front of six vats, each one holding the clone of a crew member of the starship Pituitary, each clone waiting for its previous incarnation to die so it could awaken. Apparently Maria wasn’t the only one to die recently…
Murder in space. Space murder. Clone space murder. From one of the best authors in the field. I am hugely excited for this and can’t wait to read it when it’s out next Fall, or, Autumn depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Here’s to Mur, Mur’s new book and to hideous clone space murder! Hooray!
In the meantime, here are: